Perch @perchingpath@eldritch.cafe

Refuge in flowers and fake leather, refuge in claws and blood, refuge in cider and garlic, refuge in snowstorms and cold water.

Watched the moon's shell grow back in such an icy wind, every gust biting right through the boyar's-cloak layers of blanket draped 'round my shoulders. A mooncalf cheerily gawping & shivering.

I wormed my belly across raw beams into the eaves, head low in deference to the shingle nails, to retrieve a paralytically frightened cat from an insulation crevice. The necessity of spelunking can abruptly manifest in one's home.

It's my birthday. I feel grim & decrepit. I want my mouth to emit spindly, quick-melting ice structures with every noise: tiny diamonds with my breath, mazily interwoven sculptures when I attempt a tonally veering sprawl of a pronouncement & start laughing before I can finish.

If you ever begin to succumb to the absurd but pervasive feeling that European comics are inherently rarified, please remember that Moebius once described Baldazzini, a man who devoted several pages of a grotesquely racist porn comic to Lara Croft's crippling insecurity over the modest size of her cock, as "an angel who allows us to glimpse the dazzling dream of our desires."

A gym in which every routine is designed to prepare its patrons' bodies to withstand inevitable careless usage by possessing spirits. (The obvious pun is both eye-rollingly gauche & wincingly mordant under the circumstances, grounds for a one-week ban.)

I'm gasping & gullible, guttering & hungry, but the ghost who needs nothing listens as I listen and we confer later on.

(Honestly, the catalog doesn't convey how beautiful this stuff is any better than my photos did. If you'll be in Philadelphia before the end of March, see this. Free on Sundays or if you go with me.)

Advising PAFA to comb their contracts for loopholes that'll let them retain the shadows of Rina Banerjee's sculptures when their casters are returned.

If I ever allow the city to synecdochically penetrate & exsanguinate me as the year begins, I'll also ask that you let me play it off as a slip, if only for insurance purposes.

Still orb season.

The bollard-of-the-woods mushroom, beyond rare, can be sold to wan city boy chefs with raw mouths & recherchées clienteles for four figures, cash-in-hand.

I was reincarnated from an uncommonly virtuous knife.

While cleaning around my plants I found 2mg of estradiol part-dissolved in one of their pots. Through some hard-to-envisage feat of clumsiness I've been feminizing a cactus. It seems happy.

Enduring some indefensible nostalgia for the asterisk era.

π
An intent man spotlit by his desk lamp in a dark room,
with you stood behind him, hand on his shoulder(,
admiring & safely ignored).
Your other hand resting in your jeans pocket,
likely not even curled around your keen little steel claw.

We found a cicada in the ashes as we cleared the hearth. The holly is laden with fruit, & the hibiscus, which may be substituted for frangipani in my propitiation, is blooming.

I unreservedly endorse incorporating a moderately common word or several into your name, and hope that in time every word will have at least the faint flavor of an acquaintance interwoven with its sound, texture, & color.

You wade into it & keep wading & the leaves become more like tongues & keep wading & sweat & they're leaves again & the light's changing & keep wading &

There are drunk girls in Santa caps moping in doorways all over Old City. Did an elf die.